Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon: Couples Authentically Explored

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/12/11

Over the last three decades, Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon has become one of today’s most trusted relationship voices. A professor, therapist, speaker, author, retreat leader, and media personality, Dr. Solomon is passionate about translating cutting-edge research and clinical wisdom into practical tools people can use to bring awareness, curiosity, and authenticity to their relationships. Her work on Relational Self-Awareness has reached millions of people around the world.

Dr. Solomon studied Psychology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan and received her PhD in Counseling Psychology and a graduate certificate in Gender Studies from Northwestern University. During graduate school, she was awarded the Dr. John J.B. Morgan Fellowship and worked at The Family Institute at Northwestern University as a research and clinical fellow.

Dr. Solomon spent many years as a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University and a faculty member in the Master of Science in Marriage and Family Therapy program at The Family Institute at Northwestern University. She was the principal investigator in The Family Institute’s Family Business Project. She is a faculty member in the School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) at Northwestern University and a licensed clinical psychologist at The Family Institute at Northwestern University.

In addition to serving as an ad hoc reviewer for leading journals like the Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy (JMFT) and Family Process and writing articles and chapters for leading academic journals and books in the field of marriage and family, she is the author of two bestselling books, Loving Bravely: Twenty Lessons of Self-Discovery to Help You Get the Love You Want and Taking Sexy Back: How to Own Your Sexuality and Create the Relationship You Want. She also writes a popular blog for Psychology Today.

Dr. Solomon maintains a psychotherapy practice for individual adults and couples. In 2024, she founded the Institute for Relational Self-Awareness (IRSA). She is a founding expert on the Mine’d app and serves on the clinical board of Dame Products. She provides clinical training to clinicians and graduate students and teaches the internationally renowned undergraduate course Building Loving and Lasting Relationships: Marriage 101. Her newest offering is a comprehensive, self-paced e-course, Intimate Relationships 101.

Dr. Solomon regularly presents to diverse groups, including the United States Military Academy at West Point, Microsoft, and the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). She is frequently asked to discuss relationships with media outlets like The Today Show, O Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, and Scientific American.

When she isn’t working, she loves long walks, sweaty workouts, and Yahtzee. She lives with her husband, Todd, and their teens in Highland Park, Illinois.

Solomon talks about her career studying relationships and intimacy. Solomon shares her upbringing in a complex family, which influences her fascination with love and relationships. They discuss how couples therapy requires understanding both partners, their interpersonal dynamics, and the cultural context. Solomon emphasizes the importance of evolving within long-term relationships and advocates for couples to embrace their growth. They also explore societal expectations around monogamy, the rise of non-monogamy, and the impact of relationship breakups, including the grief and shame often associated with them.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Dr. Alexandra Solomon from the Institute for Relational Self-Awareness, IRSA. She’s calling in from Chicago. So, how did you first get interested in relationships, intimacy, couples, and so on? You’ve been doing this for close to three decades now?

Professor Alexandra Solomon: Not quite three, but getting close. More than two. Yes, this has truly been my life’s work. The deepest version of the story is that I grew up in a home watching my parents struggle in their relationships in a complicated blended family that faced challenges in several ways.

So I had that influence—what I was watching and experiencing in my home—and I grew up during the early days of Oprah, Phil Donahue, self-help, and Dr. Ruth. My whole life, I was fascinated by the world of love, sex, and relationships. But I had it in my head that I had to become a medical doctor. Luckily, I had a breakthrough in college and realized that I could make studying relationships my life’s work, which has suited me well.

There’s a way in which the expertise I’ve developed is in honour of the little girl I used to be, who felt so overwhelmed and confused by what her parents were going through. Now, I can be of service in my life today. I’m deeply grateful for my career and all the places it has taken me for individuals who have gone through difficult family circumstances and have become licensed clinical psychologists—which, for those listening, is considered elite within the field of psychology because these programs are a) difficult to get into and b) rigorous, compared to many other programs. It’s not to diminish other programs, but these have a certain mythology around them.

My program had five people in it. I was in a cohort of five, and to this day, I still feel immense gratitude for the professor who saw my application. I went straight from undergrad and worked incredibly hard. I had written a rigorous undergrad honours thesis, but did she ever take a chance on me? I hope I’ve done right by her because, yes, these clinical psychology PhD programs are hard to get into, and they are brutal.

Jacobsen: So, before we dive into more of the main topics, which we’ll cover in session 2, what did you realize while doing that program—that intensive training—about your family history? I’m sure many people who go through these programs, especially those with challenging circumstances, gain a lot of self-insight.

Jacobsen: Yes, that is truly the heart of any good training program preparing people to become clinicians. My program prepared me to become both an academic/researcher and a clinician. However, that clinical aspect—any program worth its tuition—will ask students to examine their history. Any responsible therapist has done their work. The best clinical training programs treat the clinician as their subject.

It’s not that there’s a world of therapists over here and a world of patients over there. No, we’re all on these journeys and must understand our histories. I gained a lot of insight into the impact of not being willing to take responsibility for your behaviour.

I put myself into therapy when I was probably 20. I was trying hard to take responsibility for myself in a way that I don’t know that I saw the grown-ups who raised me taking responsibility for themselves. I understood that we get to be works in progress and on our healing journeys. The grown-ups I saw growing up were acting out their pain rather than turning towards their pain and trying to heal it.

Now, I’m the mom of two young adults, and who knows? They may well sit in their own therapy offices someday and talk about the ways I acted out my pain rather than healing it. But I feel pretty confident that one of the things I modelled in our home, as my husband and I were raising our kids, was taking responsibility for ourselves, our moods, and our words. I’ve spent many years apologizing to my kids when I’ve been thoughtless or sharp-tongued and tried to come back and make things right.

Jacobsen: Do you think many of these family issues stem from a certain pain point for that parent?

Solomon: Absolutely, yes. When I am working with—I don’t do therapy with children. Still, when I’m working with a couple, we often talk about the challenges they’re facing with their kids. There are disagreements between parents, or parents are stressed about things their kids are doing or not doing. My first question is, I want to hear from both partners. I want to hear about their childhoods. I specifically want to know what was going on in their life when they were the same age as their kid is now.

Because there are certain ages and stages of parenting that are particularly difficult for parents, one of the reasons can be that this is the point at which their father left the family or the point at which they, God forbid, suffered sexual trauma. So, that thing the parent went through, which they may have shoved aside or pushed away, gets reactivated when their child reaches that age.

Jacobsen: When you’re talking about self-awareness, for someone like myself who is not an expert, I think of these things as internal work. That awareness is like circling back on itself. As opposed to regular couples therapy, which is between two people, this awareness also involves a circular process within the individual. Does that complicate couples therapy when you’re adding self-awareness into the mix?

Solomon: There is a core feature to that. You’re asking good questions for someone who isn’t an expert. That’s an excellent question. I’m currently developing a certification course for couples therapy, and that’s the thing I find most exciting and most challenging—how to train someone to become a competent couples therapist. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, training graduate students to become couples therapists at the Family Institute at Northwestern, so this is not my first time doing it. But at this point, every time I teach, I can reevaluate and reflect on, “Why do I believe what I believe?”

Why do I do what I do? And you’re exactly right. When I am sitting with a couple, there are four things I keep in mind: the psychology of partner A, the psychology of partner B, the interpersonal process that happens between them, and, fourth, the cultural backdrop that shapes everything that all three of us are thinking and feeling. So, there are four lenses of analysis in couples therapy. It isn’t very easy, and my husband Todd and I have been in couples therapy over the years. I have distinct memories of it, and one memory is sitting with a couples therapist—and let me tell you, it’s a pain to be a couples therapist for other therapists!

So, I do not envy the various providers. But when I’ve been in the role of a couples therapy recipient, I had the experience of one of our therapists. I could tell she was a good psychologist but didn’t know how to hold the system. She could understand Todd’s psychology, and she could understand Alexandra’s psychology. Still, I didn’t feel like she held the relational process we were going through.

Then, I have another memory of a therapist who was able to shape and refine the dance that Todd and I got into. So, that is a distinct skill set—how do you hold both the individuals and the couple?

Jacobsen: Now, I’ve heard much commentary around a rise in narcissism in the general culture, as well as the difficulty in treating Cluster B personality disorders. Yet, in contrast, I’ve heard proactive, constructive conversations around authenticity as a deterrent to narcissism and as a way to reduce the emergence of problematic psychological traits in oneself.

When you are in this therapeutic process with these four factors, do you try to elicit more authentic responses between the couple so they can develop more natural, genuine, healthy, and integrated relationships within the partnership?

Solomon: Yeah, I do. That’s a whole different conversation for us to have about this so-called rise in narcissism, which I have some concerns about. We must be having a larger, more general conversation about narcissism, and I’m here for that. But I worry that we are watering it down. When there’s much information out there, there’s also a responsibility to use it carefully and not just stick a label on your partner, like, “You are a narcissist.” Certainly, narcissistic tendencies exist, and we all have the risk of slipping into those tendencies—deflecting, defending, saying, “It’s not me.”

One of my roles as a couples therapist is helping create an office environment that feels safe enough for people to hold up a mirror and look at their behaviour gently and compassionately, which evokes self-compassion in the client.

Certainly, I have had very resistant clients—arms crossed, saying, “No way. I’m not looking at myself.” But I’ve also had the experience where someone reluctantly comes into my couples therapy office. They might be coded as narcissistic because they are deflecting, defending, afraid to take responsibility, and maybe have never been asked to do so.

That has been my job—to leverage my experience, heart, and alliance with that client to help them safely start looking at the “why.” Some people can have quite offensive-looking behaviours—deflecting, defending, and defensiveness. Those are offensive behaviours. But when I can see through that and understand the pain that drove that behaviour, it’s not making an excuse for it but contextualizing it. When I can reach for that pain and understand who they were as a little boy and why that way of coping was a survival strategy in their home when they were little, then we can start to peel back the layers. We can start to learn some new skills.

Then I can help that client tenderly reparent that little boy. I can invite the partner to look differently at those patterns that have been so hurtful, and we can start to create a different dynamic.

Jacobsen: So what do you do when dealing with more cognitive, intellectual clients, and clients who talk like regular people but don’t necessarily speak in terms of abstraction? When you’re trying to get the point across about noticing a problem, wanting to communicate that to them, and working out a process to reintegrate to a better place of homeostasis for the relationship?

Solomon: I am responsible for modifying my approach to meet clients where they are. One of the ways I do that is by using their language—playing their language back to them and then building on it.

Another way might be sharing something and checking in, ensuring they understand what I’ve offered. Just because something makes sense in my head doesn’t mean it makes sense in somebody else’s head. Something else I might do, even if I have a strong feeling that I’m on a track that’s going to be accurate or resonant, is to say, “I might be out in the left field with this, but let me run it by you and see what you think.” I get super, super circumspect with something.

That’s at the heart of empathy. Empathy is sometimes reflecting someone’s current feelings toward them. Still, there’s another level of empathy:

• Taking someone’s words and description and advancing it
• Deepening it
• Taking it to the next place

That’s an attuned empathy—I see where you’re at, I match that, and I raise it slightly.

Yes, those are some of the thoughts off the top of my head in terms of how I work. Certainly, it’s different to work with someone who has years of therapy under their belt compared to someone who’s working things out in real-time. This might be their first time thinking about it, and that’s not necessarily an age thing.

I’ve had 25-year-olds where it’s their first time in therapy, and I’ve had 55-year-olds where it’s their first time in therapy. So, there’s a learning curve. I’ve been in this world for so long that I forget what a particular way of thinking and talking is, and it takes a while to help people get oriented and comfortable with it.

Jacobsen: What clients can be difficult, if not impossible, to work with—individually or as a couple?

Solomon: Do you mean for me or the field in general? I can tell you what the research tells me. 

Jacobsen: Good insight. So, individually, but with some side commentary on the field. I’m aware of some comments from various experts who say, “Cluster B personality disorder is code for, ‘difficult patient.’”

Solomon: Yes, the research says that the most difficult couples to work with are—I know the top 3. The top three that couples therapists will tell you are:

Number 1 is lack of love. It’s hard to work with a couple with such big walls built up—years of disconnection, they haven’t touched in years, and there hasn’t been softness or vulnerability for a long time. That reawakening is difficult. Sometimes, what can make that easier is if we can find a place in their story where they used to feel that way, then at least we’re trying to reawaken something that used to be there. But there are couples where it never was, and that’s a relationship founded in companionship, creating different markers for health and goodness. That’s one.

Number 2, the research shows, is active addiction. When one or both people are struggling with active addiction, that makes couples therapy hard. Many people would say that couples therapy is contraindicated—that people ought to manage their addiction first, prioritize working on the individual addiction, and then do the couple’s work. However, many addiction programs include relational treatment as part of it because the research shows stronger long-term results and lower relapse rates when there has been couples or family therapy as part of addiction treatment.

And number 3 is infidelity, which is another difficult one. I have a bit of a specialty in working with couples recovering from infidelity. At any given time, about three-quarters of my couples are infidelity recovery cases. So yes, those cases are difficult, but I also love that work. I feel well-suited to hold on to everyone’s humanity. I don’t necessarily struggle with the one who has transgressed.

It’s easy for me to hold on to gentleness, to their dignity, even as I can feel critical about what they did and how much harm they caused their partner. I do have a harder time with couples where there’s a lot of emotional dysregulation. Those cases are difficult because I play traffic cop, putting up my hand and asking people to stop and talk to me, not their partner. That’s not my most comfortable place to be. I can do it, but it makes me feel a little sweaty and shaky, and it takes me a while to come down after a session like that.

Those sessions may not cause the same activation for other therapists, but that’s my sense.

Jacobsen: Are there certain trends in relational issues that are cultural? For instance, if we looked at Canada, the United States, and Mexico, are there certain trends in North America that come up more often than in other cultural contexts? Or does every bad relationship show the same general signs, regardless of culture?

Solomon:  It’s not that cultural factors make things worse in one area of the world compared to another. 

Jacobsen: That’s interesting. 

Solomon: I don’t think of any particular line of research that rings a bell for me around that. The first thought that comes to my mind is a trend that I suspect is more prevalent in the U.S. than in some other parts of the world—couples wanting to figure out how to move from sexual monogamy to consensual non-monogamy, ethical non-monogamy, or polyamory. There’s also a set of couples where one partner wants to “open up” the relationship. In contrast, the other wants to remain monogamous, creating almost a mixed-orientation relationship.

It’s been about a decade now. Still, for much of my career, I didn’t know a single thing about consensual non-monogamy. All I knew was that it happened in the sixties—many couples tried it, things got a little weird, and everyone decided that was not the way to do it. That was all I learned in my training; it wasn’t even a topic. Couples and monogamy were like peanut butter and jelly. It was, “These things go together; it’s natural; it’s baked into the equation.”

But over the past ten years, my field has started having this conversation, and it’s super important. I’m glad we’re having it because no matter where a couple lands, they should be discussing the boundaries around their relationship. How do they define fidelity? What priority do they place on it? What are the risks and consequences of monogamy? What are its strengths and benefits? Do they want monogamy? Why do they want monogamy? Do they want to be open? Why do they want to be open? How do they protect their relationship in either scenario?

When something is explored rather than assumed, everyone can become more deeply committed to it and understand more about themselves—why they want to advocate for a particular relational architecture. So, it’s a pretty exciting time in that way. That’s an emerging trend.

Jacobsen: That makes intuitive sense. We’re psychologically complex creatures, so I’d expect a constellation of relational types rather than just one. Evolutionarily, even. There’s one category for the majority, but also for a minority—what if relationships aren’t for them or only for short periods? They might be categorized as serial monogamists or people for whom lifelong singlehood is their temperament.

Not as a judgment, but as a description: some people don’t do relationships well. 

Solomon: That’s another important shift I’ve seen throughout my career. I came into this field after drinking the Kool-Aid. There’s a hierarchy in relationships, where the number one relationship in an adult’s life is their romantic, intimate partnership—and everybody should want that.

Everyone should look for their partner. The goal is one love story. You find your person, you marry your person, and you die next to them, God willing, many, many, many years later. That was the notion I had. It’s been baked into my field.

My field is marriage and family therapy, or couple and family therapy. We call that “matrionormativity”—what is normative is wanting and prioritizing romantic love. It’s fascinating to see the number of books that have come out in the last few years that make the case for questioning this idea. Along with that, there’s a whole bunch of research showing that we have a collective bias against single people. There is a headwind for single people.

This research isn’t old. Research in the last 10 to 15 years shows that when you ask people in a survey—when you give a survey participant a description of a person and say that this person is single with certain qualities—those people are deemed to be more selfish and more immature than the same made-up characterization of a person in a relationship. We have a collective stereotype against single people, which we’re finally starting to unearth, examine, and ask why. Along with that comes an elevation of friendship.

People ask, “Wait, why have we always put spouses above friends? What’s the consequence of having done that?” I was giving a talk at a conference to therapists about how to help clients going through a breakup or divorce. The first question from the audience was, “What about friendship breakups?”

This collective “Yes!” was because friendship breakups are incredibly painful. Yet, they’re a form of what we call disenfranchised grief. When somebody goes through a divorce, they’re likely to get the support of family and friends because, collectively, we know divorce is hard and stressful. But who supports someone going through a friendship breakup, which can be an exquisite and gut-wrenching loss?

We’re in this interesting moment where we’re starting to elevate friendship collectively, asking, “Why the heck do we care?” Why would we say someone is a better person just because they’re in a relationship rather than single? And we’re starting to wonder if maybe we’ve overloaded our romantic relationships—expecting too much from them—and not enough from friendships. So, it’s a cool moment.

Jacobsen: A few thoughts come to mind there, and they’re a constellation of different questions. On the first one, it’s almost as if we’re in the sixties and seventies again, where people took the cultural deck of cards and threw it in the air. We have more cards in the deck being thrown up, with more cards added as they fall, metaphorically. We’ll be seeing more and more discussions, open discussions academically, along with the evidence coming in. How will that evidence evolve to give us a clearer picture of these different modes of being? Are there any early indications?

Solomon: Well, the one indication we have is not early—we have 80 years of data from Harvard. Harvard has been conducting a longitudinal study about happiness, and they’re now in their fourth wave of principal investigators because they’ve been doing it since the 1930s. They’ve been looking at various indicators to see what ties to happiness—income, physical health, career goals, family, etc. They’ve found, over and over again, that it’s the quality of people’s relationships that determines the quality of their lives. And that’s not just romantic relationships; it’s also the depth of friendships, connection with adult siblings, etc.

That’s what has shined through in that data—our relationships make life good. So why do we spend so much time stressing about our jobs and Instagram followers when the goodness in life is in the people we get to love and those who love us? So, I guess that’s what I would say about our indications. However, research is always limited by the framing of the researchers.

We also have a cool new wave of researchers asking questions about relationships and framing the evidence differently. A lot of our research has been about marriage. But what marriage? Cis, white, hetero, middle-class marriage. So, we’ve needed a new generation of researchers to ask different kinds of questions.

Jacobsen: So, the biggest life stressors are breakups, divorces, and the like?

Solomon: Yes, when individuals go through these, it’s a subjective experience with many physiological, psychological, and mental health impacts. 

Jacobsen: Yet, at the same time, that frame of mind is based on a cultural frame. As you noted, the reverse of the bias against singlehood is this pedestal we’ve created for monogamy and the idea of finding a “soulmate” or “twin flame”—these mythologies we throw around. That subjective experience can be amplified, increasing negative effects when it doesn’t match societal expectations.

You’ve lost that potential attainment—or what you thought was attainment. So, could we see a reduction in the stressfulness of these life events with a broadening of the landscape or a freeing up of–let’s say–structures on an individual’s sense of individuality and authenticity in life?

Solomon: At the very least, what we might do is liberate people from the experience of shame in their loss. Part of what makes a breakup or divorce so painful is the shame attached to it. If you have, “failed” in what society has told you is the most important, it’s easy to slip its grief into shame.

There will always be grief. Whenever we lose people, even if we have a robust network of people who matter to us, losing any one of those connections will still bring grief. But if we can shift the cultural framing, maybe, we can reduce the additional layer of shame that comes with it.

We’re still these fancy mammals. We get hardwired to each other. Our nervous systems become interdependent with those who matter to us, so pain and loss will always exist. There’s always going to be grief. But grief plus shame is a much worse, much more painful experience than grief without shame.

Jacobsen: How do you advocate for the success of couples who almost self-stereotype? I see this across political and social lines. They have these ideas in their mind—you can tell by how they talk and interact with their spouse in session. They’re thinking: “I have to be the best homemaker,” or “I have to be the best breadwinner.” More recently, “I have to be the best boss babe,” or, “I have to best male advocate,” and so on.

My biases lean more toward the latter, which are mine. So how do we, in those sessions, advocate for people to be authentic to their temperament, which could be a mix of all those things?

Solomon: Well, yeah. And by the way, add to that the idea that someone might have different “eras”—to borrow Taylor Swift’s language. Swift could have a boss babe era but then step out of it and want a cozy, comfortable, simple era. And that’s one of the things about a long-term relationship.

We marry a person at time without knowing who they’ll be at time later. That’s the challenge. I don’t even know—my husband and I am probably in our fourth or fifth “marriage” together. We know we’re “recreating” what this marriage of ours is about.

That’s what truly is in couple therapy. I don’t think a couples therapist helps a couple in their search for their true selves as much as a couple therapist helps create a strong enough container where they can be their evolving selves together—where they keep cheering for each other and figuring out how to optimize their self-expression while honouring the relationship. It’s about optimizing and having the space to keep growing because none of us are ever done evolving.

You’re right. That’s what I see when I work with a couple in year 25 of their marriage, and they’ve never seen a therapist before. I guarantee you, a lot of what we’re doing is talking about the grief of unfulfilled promises—who you said you were going to be but never were—and then a lot of forgiving.

I love it when I get to be with a couple early on in their relationship because we can create a vision for the relationship that allows a lot of permission. It doesn’t feel like shackles; it doesn’t feeling like “you have to be this to me.” Instead, we can “create a marriage where the agreement is to support each other’s growth” because, truly, who knows what will happen?

Even if nothing unexpected happens—like an illness, a job loss, or family stress—many things change along the way.

Jacobsen: Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Solomon: Yes, you’re a really interesting conversation partner. This is a good space for you.

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